It’s been rhyme-and-reason week. You go 100 years without ever thinking about
a poet, and then all of a sudden they are everywhere. The scandal at Oxford
managed briefly to elbow venal MPs off the news. There was something
hopelessly, Wodehouseianly English about these stories. The greatest crisis
in democracy since the Reform Act brought about by duck houses, tampons and
moat cleaning, and then Oxford dons reaching for the smelling salts with one
hand and a stiletto with the other, all over predatory libidos and
blue-stocking innuendo. You wonder, would they ever have managed to elect
Byron? Precocious, strong on classics, popular verse, shags everything in a
corset, including his sister. Or Dylan Thomas? Or Catullus? The poet Michael
Horowitz was on the Today programme with a voice that sounded like a wax
cylinder tiptoeing out of a brass speaking tube. He explained that poetry
had caught an infection from the rest of the ghastly, pustular commercial
world. Poets, he readily said, should be solitary, distanced and possibly
consumptive and sexually ambivalent.
The BBC has been doing its best to bring poets and poetry kicking and
screaming, or perhaps mincing and weeping, into the nation’s green room; to
turn them into the culture’s footballers. Which means poetry has to be
played out under the arc lights of the Tristrams’ favourite culture words,
which are — all together, now — “relevant” and “accessible”. What rhymes
with relevant and accessible? Patronising and explanatory and simplified and
unenthusiastic? Can you all go away now and make a poem out of those
wonderful words? Use your coloured crayons. Relevant and accessible actually
means mediated by a friendly, classless autodidact who can josh and cajole
you through the tricky business of pentameter and sonnet form and make sure
you don’t feel culturally embarrassed or aesthetically humiliated.
Last week, the BBC continued with its verse-off to find the best poet in the
land, ever, the contest that was so successfully rolled out for the greatest
Briton, in which Diana, Princess of Wales kicked the stuffing out of
Shakespeare (I spoke for the Bard and still feel resentful). Maybe the BBC
is running this top-dog week to show up the plebs on ITV, who are doing
Britain’s Got Talent.
Anyway, we started with good John Donne, pimped for our edification by
Simon Schama, one of the great TV enthusiasts and explainers. His cultural
credentials are blue-chip. He is a populariser in the best sense, and he
made a good case for Donne as a man; in fact, rather better than he
deserved. Donne was not naturally likeable or commendable, a cross between
Russell Brand and Alan Clark, who kept his poor wife pregnant until the 12th
little Donne done her in. Then he got fundamental religion and berated the
congregation of St Paul’s that they were hell-bound if they did what he had
been doing for 40 years. Schama talked to John Carey about his work. Carey
really should do a lot more arts television. He has an incisive but
sympathetic way with him.
But... Didn’t you just know there was going to be a “but”? The life and the
analysis were all fine, but then there were the poems. Whatever you think of
the man, his words are immortal. To be shagged by him was probably
transitory and rather demeaning, but to be wooed by him must have been
sublime. I imagine some conclave of Tristrams saying: “Do we have to have
the poems? Couldn’t we just dramatise the sex and have him writing naked in
the morning to music?” But the poems are inescapable. And so one of them
must have suggested just doing quick quotes, the best bits, and then
slapping his head and saying: “Hey, out of the box, off the menu, but why
don’t we get a woman to read them? Most of our viewers are housewives. What
about Fiona Shaw?”
Brilliant. That’s exactly what you want. An Irishwoman reading the words of a
cockney man. How much accessible and relevant can you handle? It was way,
way beyond horrible. Shaw is already responsible for the second most awful
versicide on television, Deborah Warner’s laughably grotesque The Waste Land
(the worst was Steven Berkoff’s masterclass on Shakespeare villains). She
mums and poses, she emotes and declaims, she underlines and emphasises, she
huffs and she puffs and arranges her face like a Bisto commercial and her
limbs like an exhausted heron. All this projected sighing and intense,
gurning coquetry makes her look starkly mad. The sense, the lustre, the
subtlety, the feeling of the words, are drowned. Ask not for whom the bell
tolls, it is the ambulance coming to take away Shaw.
In fairness, almost all actors are appalling versifiers. They come to poetry
as if it were drama, an audition piece, a soliloquy. They make poems
performances. In short, actors act, so we shouldn’t be surprised. But poetry
isn’t drama: the imposition of a character, the inflection of emotion and
opinion, diminishes it. Despite its origins, the whole business of out-loud
poetry is problematic. Nobody will ever read you Donne or Shakespeare’s
sonnets or Eliot with more poignancy and meaning, more beautifully, than the
voice in your head.
Then we had Armando Iannucci campaigning on behalf of Milton, in Milton’s
Heaven and Hell. This is a difficult sell.
Paradise Lost is great, but it’s measured, not by verses, but by the yard.
There are sheets and sheets of it that are opaquely dull. Iannucci made a
very compelling case for it, or, at least, for picking it up with both
hands. He read snatches in the way your favourite English teacher pointed
out the bits you should memorise for an exam. By the end, I liked Iannucci
rather more than I liked Milton. The poet had been the plinth for the
presenter.
And then there was Michael Wood on Beowulf. Most people have only read
Beowulf because they were forced to under threat of being made to do manual
labour for the rest of their lives, after being sent down from university.
It is by convention and degree syllabus the starting block for English
literature, albeit that it is written in a defunct Germanic language about a
Swede who goes to Denmark. Only a few hobbity university bods can speak it,
and having learnt Nordic Elvish they speak little else and share a
particular accent that sounds like something from The Lord of the Rings or
the Muppets. They wear odd clothes, usually involving a great deal of
leather, hoodies, amulets on thongs and a lot of buckles. Beowulf should be
spoken out loud — indeed, it should be bellowed, otherwise the people trying
to get out of the room won’t hear it.
I’ve always vouched that there was no human activity that was above, below or
beside the box, but after this week I’m beginning to think maybe poetry is
the exception. Television is a show-and-tell medium, and so, in a completely
different sense, is poetry. The BBC has been confronted with the quandary of
what you actually show when the poetry is showing itself. The visions
collide, and what you get is the equivalent of old masters printed on
T-shirts. Bad art and bad fashion. Poetry won’t be filleted into soundbites.
The words remain, but the poetry evaporates. Poetry is hard. It exists at
the ceiling of comprehension and feeling, and when you come down with the
sense of it, it’s as miraculous as anything man has conceived. Having it
delivered to you like pizza by Fiona Shaw isn’t quite the same thing.
It’s not television’s job to tease and trick reluctant folk to open poetry
books, just as it isn’t poetry’s business to make people watch television.
We get to poetry by our own circuitous routes, and the enjoyment and awe are
greater for it. Finally, though, poetry doesn’t belong on television because
it isn’t a mass medium.
This is a television column, however, and we couldn’t let the final episode of ER
pass without pulling the sheet over its head and saying a few choked, trite
but profound words over it. In truth, it has been kept on life support much
longer than its vital signs warranted, but still it managed to introduce an
impressive cast of characters. Few series manage to survive the exit of
their romantic leads, especially if they’re George Clooney, and ER got
through more romantic leads than 101 Dalmatians. But, some years ago, it
wore away the things that made it memorably watchable: the brilliant, fluid
Steadicam work and the amazing technical rap of the medical instructions. An
actor who was in it told me the writers would tum-te-tum the rhythm, then
medical advisers would fill in appropriate words. It was like a millennial
Beowulf. Poetry may not work on television, but occasionally television can
make poetry.
Simon Schama’s John Donne (BBC2, Tuesday)
Milton’s Heaven and Hell (BBC2, Wednesday)
Michael Wood on Beowulf (BBC4, Thursday)
ER (More 4, Thursday)
